Yea or Nay? A Wooden Chef's Knife

Self-cleaning or un-self aware?

The Germans know a thing or several about engineering and materials, but this Kickstarting knife has me squinting. It's called the Lignum//Skid and is made by a team of designers and metal smiths in Magdeburg, Germany. Its clear selling point is the unusual use of wood integrated almost completely throughout the blade.

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The blade is made from high carbon steel, inset into a slim Robina or walnut wood body. This looks bold, while capturing the warm touch and claimed anti-bacterial properties of oiled wood. Cleaning is a simple clean water affair, and upkeep is just periodic re-oiling. It's obviously unwise to run it through a dishwasher, but that's true of many nice knives.

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It's been through both stress testing and field testing with real chefs, which should be perfunctory, particularly with a name like lignum. The form of the handle itself is a lovely shape, and they're even offering damascus steel levels. They also claim that their minimally-described process produces far less carbon than traditional steel knives, and are off setting the remainder with a tree planting initiative. So that's nice. But does that gap trap food?

And seriously, how on earth do you sharpen this thing in the long run? Other than while drinking:

11 Comments

With the right species of wood, this isn't that outlandish of a concept. Black Locust (what they're using here) is pretty durable and quite resistance to water and rot. I could think of a lot of woods that would be better suited to this application, but then they probably couldn't get the production volume they'd like out of more niche species of wood. Still, I'd love to see some special editions of this product in ever more dense and durable species.

The biggest drawback of this design is the thickness of the blade. This is going to be far thicker and taper to that thickness faster than a typical chef's knife. This could be problematic when cutting softer or more fragile foods. Dicing tofu with this knife would be a nightmare. Worth it for the looks, knowing that most chefs have multiple options? Yeah, probably. But touting this as a practical catch-all solution to a kitchen knife is a fallacy.

This is a bit like a wooden anchor; some mock the fact that it floats, but golly gee does it look good doing it. This knife is way to thick to do it's job properly. On top of that, the tongue and groove attachment between blade and wood would be lucky to survive more than a year or so; the tongue can't be more than 1.5mm thick! If you want a beautiful knife that's a handmade piece of art, take a look at Japanese cutlery. For the same price you can have a knife custom made by a 5th generation bladesmith like Watanabe. All that said, it is very pretty and I wish the designers the best of luck on their crowdfunding.